


Entrance Hall

by KuraiOfAnagura



Category: One Piece
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:34:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5729674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KuraiOfAnagura/pseuds/KuraiOfAnagura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Smoker never had dared to touch the place in his heart where Ace had resided. Yet Ace is dead and his heart as well is no longer in his chest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entrance Hall

**Author's Note:**

> This is set right after Law cut out Smoker's heart on Punk Hazard.

He more came to his senses than actually waking up without knowing where he was or even who he was. The surrounding a blurry endless grey and white. It is empty and filled. Vast and narrow. Nothing to be grasped and nothing to be touched. With a dawning realization who he was and what has happened, he gently touches his chest, finding it unscratched but empty. That bastard of a doctor had taken it.  
„Am I dead?“ he rather thinks to himself, yet in the utter silence of his current surroundings it roars out loud, vibrating in the not-air which he's breathing. Slowly he rises to his knees.  
„No, you're not. Dying's rather fucked up. You'd haven't had to ask if you were really dead.“  
The White Hunter froze, eyes steady on the ground, which he was for sure touching but not seeing.  
His voice. He'd recognize it as if it had been yesterday and not two years ago.  
He was oddly sitting in mid-air, one leg pulled over the other, the ever permanent grin on his lips. Yet they did not move. And as hard his own thoughts had drummed in this silence, his bears an echo without a core. A distance not to be crossed.  
He stares in silence at him, receiving a gently grin in return. The absence of any noise mirroring the lack of any brain activity going on behind the marines forehead. „Then why?“  
„You're having a near-death experience, I think.“  
„You... think?“  
„Du-hu, I'm not all knowing, you know? But you're here, not moving forward, not able to go backwards. But you called for me and here I can reach you.“ While the sentence had started in his rather annoying and mocking sing-sang of a voice the last part had a vibration with him that struck the White Hunters heart. Wherever it may be in this moment.  
„Where is 'here'?“ He received nothing as an answer except that the grin became toothy.  
„The better question's how you came here?“  
Stubbornness dwelled within him from the memory of the lost battle, but before he could controle himself the thoughts thundered through the vast emptiness again „That bastard of a warlord Law took my heart.“ The quirked eyebrow was saying more than a thousand books could've told.  
„Ope ope no mi. He cut it right out of my chest.“  
„So the infamous Commodore Smoker lost?“  
„Vice Admiral, brat.“  
„Congratulations, though you're really gonna start this now?“ He cupped his face in his hand, resting his weight on his arm. Smoker dared, for the first time, to look past the playful line of lips and into those black orbs. Immediately something _pulled_ inside of him, paralysing him, _hurting_ him where he was sure his soul was located if he still had one.  
„Not so pleasant to see into deaths face, isn't it?“ Again that mocking attitude.  
Smoker gulped hard, feeling suddenly very cold.  
„You died.“  
„Yes.“  
It was a heaviness that stretched between them. Flickers of long forgotten memories rising up like sparks and dying away equally as fast. He seemed to feel the urge to fill the crying gap.  
„It's probably the best way of dying, don't you think? Saving my beloved little brother with my last action, aware of how much love I've received during my full and, let us admit this here, not so boring live?“  
„You never told me about your heirloom.“  
Here he sighs understandingly. Not even the mentioning of his biggest secret can bring him out of his calm as the White Hunter notices.  
„I didn't want you to know. I wanted you to see me for who I am and not for whom's son I am.“  
„That was the most cliché - filled answer I ever received,“ the marine states dryly which earned him a little laugh.  
„Yet you died.“  
„Yes.“  
„And you smiled.“ The eyes, which he didn't dare to cross again, turn into slits.  
„Me being here is probably one of the better proofs that people out there cared and felt for me.”  
“What does that mean?” Even in a situation like this the younger one draws him on the edge, always playing with fire so that the question's more a snarl than anything.  
“Never heard of the rumours that you can meet up with your loved ones after death? When someone like you makes a step over the line they normally call out to familiar things. This _here_ is something like the entrance hall. There but not yet. So I could follow your call.”  
“Sounds very eerie to me.” Again he tried to take a look in his face, again something stabbed him right into his core, trying to pull him further apart.  
“Dying's not particular all roses and honey, Smoker.” There. He'd said his name. The thing that tucked at his heartstrings now was all to familiar.  
Grief.  
Pain over the lost one and Sorrow to feel a slave to ones own morals and loyalties for the first time in his life.  
“Why did you smile?”  
A chuckle. “Is it this alien to you? I achieved everything I wanted. I could be with my brother. I was ready for a new adventure ” Therein lies the cemented certainty in his words, that became so much of a trademark for the D. Brothers. Something Smoker had learned to recognize... and to envy.  
“He has strong friends. He is loved. I can think I can leave him, watching from apart.” A little pleasant sigh can be heard, rising again memories. The last time he'd met up with Ace was two weeks before he'd slammed into Blackbeard, fought and lost. They'd parted the usual way. Him yelling at the laughing pirate. But as he got the news from the HQ something in him had frozen. Fast and lethal.  
He had not dared to touch this part of him ever since. Now he felt it vulnerable exposed.  
“Just give him a fair chance, I know you can be mean by times,” there's a wink in those words. Of course. He would never ask him to spare his brother, to go against the Justice he'd chosen as his own to follow.  
“Ace..”  
“I know.”  
“I...”  
“Yeah, I know.”  
Never too many words. Always the rule of the dawn. But still...  
“How can I get back? Tashigi seems in a lot of trouble.”  
“I don't know. This is up to you. Forward or backward. Either way I'll stay with you.”


End file.
